


Crude Calculus

by leah_btw



Category: Fear the Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Fluff, Pictures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 13:46:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7107421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leah_btw/pseuds/leah_btw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris was lucky to get into Calculus. He really was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crude Calculus

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before a lot of this happened in the show. Oh well.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

The girl in front of him has a crude tattoo on her wrist. Chris notices it when he’s sliding into class late on Monday. Her sleeves are pulled up to her elbows and several heavy beaded bracelets clank down to meet them. She’s cupping her chin into her palms. It’s an outline, only black ink. Shaped almost like a spiraling heart, wrapping like a rose around each twisted turn. It’s almost a brand against her ivory skin. Chris knows for a fact that she glows in the sunlight that’s peering through the classroom windows. In the right lighting she’s a smooth tan and he tries not to think of it often.

They’d never shared a class until now. In fact, he didn’t even know her name. Chris was entering the second half of his junior year, while she was well into her senior. He’d only just been able to skim his way into this Calculus course. Math isn’t his strong suit, but what he lacked in actual understanding, he excelled in determination. His best friend Julio helped, however. Double and triple integration was practically addition to him nowadays. Dual enrollment at a community college was actually challenging him, while Chris beat his way into regular Calculus.

This was all beside the point: the girl in front of him has a crude tattoo on her wrist. She has a bored look on her face and she pays no attention to Chris as he stumbles his way into the classroom.

The teacher snips at him, “Chris Manawa, why am I not surprised.”

“Sorry, Mr. Tylian.” Chris tries to smile innocently with a shoulder shrug to match.

Laughter erupts from the back most row, where a few of his other friends are. The teacher makes another joke about tardiness to get the attention off of Chris. He’s only mildly gratefully. Mr. Tylian shoos Chris back, with a pointed look to the remaining open seat. It’s by the windows and behind her.

Her face is a small smile and soft cheeks.

Chris tries not to trip on his way over. He practically falls into the seat instead. She glances back at the loud clang, but doesn’t ask if he’s alright.

The class is spent learning of limits and tracing the curve of her neck below her wavy sunlit hair.

Chris makes sure to write the homework in thin black ink on the back of his left hand.

 

It’s stressful. Calculus is eating him alive. Julio guides him through the homework the next few nights. The extra AP Biology homework and the Comm intro speech that’s due at the end of the week is enough already. He tries not to doubt himself so early in the year, but it still sits heavy on his shoulders.

‘Limits won’t be the hardest part,’ Julio reminded him the first night, his gaped teeth too white for his own good. Chris pretended to brain himself with the scissors from his desk drawer. Julio had laughed so hard he fell from his perch on Chris’s bed. Chris scoffs at the memory now, settled deeply into his desk chair.

The Calc homework is due that Friday. Liza, his mother, won’t let him procrastinate on this class out of the six he’s taking and he has no intention of doing so. A goal of his is to have at least one test pinned to the refrigerator. He’s only halfway done and feeling like he’s falling apart. Crossing off the first two sections is a blessing.

The bed is a dream when he stumbles into it after shoving his books in his bag.

 

The homework on his arm is somehow different than last time he looked at it. The last two sections are circled in blue, a rough oval that points to writing off to the side. It’s flowy, bubbly in a way that his handwriting isn’t.

 

 

 

They learn about the circled sections in class that Friday. He’s behind her again, talking shit with Robert behind him. The black writing on his hand was faded now, the blue sticking out like a sore thumb. Only the black had washed off in the shower that morning. Chris wore a long sleeve that day to cover his hand. They’re would be talk if he flaunted it around the school like that. Julio would ask, and so would Robert.

Chris supposes it doesn’t matter as halfway through the day it disappears before his eyes. He’s in Biology at the time. A scalpel bounces out of his hand when he notices. His partner Jezebel only tells him to wash it before using it again.

 

He convinces himself it’s a fluke. Matches are rare, especially at his age. No one he knows is matched, both his age and older. It just wasn’t common. The chances that he was matched – due to age, family history, and so many other factors – was less than one percent. The thought was shoved to the back of his head.

He lets the idea of it stew for three weeks before deciding this.

Chris worries about Calculus instead. He stops writing his homework on his skin, instead using the school-issued planner that he got at the beginning of the year. Julio laughs at him for it, but ultimately follows his example. He’d forgotten the persuasive speech for Comm just last week. Professor Kilian wasn’t as forgiving as a high school teacher would have been. Chris makes sure to give Julio just the right amount of shit for it.

 

Two months after the blue ink incident, Chris is settling at his desk. His Calc book is open next to him but he’s distracted. The straw in his water is flicked around with the ice in the bottom of the glass. Chris just wasn’t in the mood to do h-descripted derivatives, let alone thirty or so examples of it.

He’s starting his third problem when he sees it. In faint purple pen on the inside of his left wrist: _What are the questions for 3.4?_

It knocks the breath right out of Chris. He shoves roughly from his desk. The rolling chair smacks harshly into his dresser across the room. It echoes dully, matching the rattling of a few trinkets on his desk resettling, some falling loudly. He’s somehow still holding onto his pencil. When he notices it, it’s thrown back onto his desk. His hands plow into his hair, yanking as his eyes flicker across his bedroom for answers. None surface, instead more questions rise.

“Chris? Is everything alright?”

He answers in a daze, somehow sounding collected, “Yeah, just slipped.”

His mom answers with the usual amount of concern and worries. It all sounds like gibberish to him, only one string of words floating around his head. Then suddenly, in a burst of hysteria, Chris begins to laugh. Head thrown back, hands still in his hair, Chris laughs until tears leak from the corners of his eyes. Stomach flaring with pain and arms feeling weaker by the minute.

“'What are the questions for 3.4?’” This starts another round of laughter, high pitched and a little desperate. He’s out of air, gasping in between slews of hilarity.

He scrambles back to his desk. Fingers not quite working right, clumsy and numb. They feel heavy and larger than normal. His handwriting is shaky and slightly bulking in the black thick-tip pen that he picks up: _1-57 odd due Friday_.

A reply appears only seconds later.

 

           

Chris is left a little wonderstruck. There’s a lightness in his chest. The tingling in his fingertips spread to his palms easily and up to his wrists. He doesn’t realize he’s smiling dopily out his bedroom window until his mother comes to his door.

“Everything alright?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Chris responds after a moment. He’s covering his wrist with his left hand. They meet gazes, Christ still smiling.

Liza nods, prepared to ask why her son is just standing in the center of his room. She backtracks when the blinding grin on his face only grows twofold. It’s best not to ruin this sudden bout of happiness.

“Okay, well, dinner’s just about ready. Come set the table?”

“Sure, mom. I’ll be out in a few.”

 

The next day at school, when all the writing had washed away in the shower, the purple fading minutes after his own, Chris still hasn’t lost that weightlessness in his chest. He’s floating on air all day, working his way through multiple classes. Julio doesn’t mention in. There’s a smile on his face though, too, happy because his best friend is. The airy feeling gets him in a trouble throughout the day, though. He’s been tardy for two out of the three classes he’s gone to, forgotten books for nearly all of them. Chris hasn’t had a pencil on him either, somehow getting by without writing a single thing down.

The speech he’d presented in Comm in the morning was on matches. It was silly and naïve, but Liza had suggested it. She was a romantic at heart, still ever hopeful that after Travis she would find her match.

‘It’s a perfect topic for an informative speech,’ she’d said over dinner three nights ago. Chris had hummed non-committedly at the time, thinking heavily about Calculus and anything he finds interesting. It seemed at the time that everything Chris had ever found cool had flown from his brain in the blink of an eye. He was left with stray thoughts on crude black ink roses and wavy sunlight hair.

Later he had taken the topic as opposed to ‘why the penny should no longer be made’ like Robert had suggested. Chris was one of three that had chosen the topic. The other two were a girl with matched parents explaining genetic studies on passing the match gene, and a broody sophomore that explained the history of matches, particularly celebrities and influential people. Chris’s was mostly statistics and small factoids on familial patterns and social behaviors. He hadn’t wanted to talk about his own match and had strayed from any emotional views on the topic. Mr. Kilian had clapped, a rare occasion.

It was the only good thing that had happened.

Until he eventually found himself in Calculus. It being the last class of the day, many people were gone for the away basketball game. She was gone, as well as four others. Chris knew that three of them were on the team, having seen them in nice dresswear at lunch. The girl that sits in front of him and a petite red head that sits up front were both gone as well. Her name is Samantha. Chris only knows because they had worked on a project together in freshman year.

“Hey, Robert, where’s Samantha? Isn’t she in your English class?” Chris turns and asks.

“Yeah, she’s dating David from the team though. Went on the fan bus.”

“Huh, forgot about that.” The fan bus was just a regular yellow school bus. It followed closely behind the team bus, stock full of girlfriends and boyfriends and fans. Chris vaguely remembers there being a limit to how many students could skip last hour to go to the away games with the team.

Chris doesn’t bother asking about the girl. He doubts that Robert knows her name, and he’s sure it would only raise suspicion.

He gets an answers anyway. Mr. Tylian enters the classroom soon after Chris has hunkered down in his desk for the next hour.

“It’s just Jake—and Jake,” the classroom chuckles and an age old subtle joke about the two, “and Darren that are gone? Oh, and Sam up front. That everyone?”

A girl one row over and seat ahead of Chris pipes up, “And Alicia.” She’s pointing a manicured finger over to _her_ seat.         

Chris suddenly feels like he’s in a wind tunnel, the air sucked from his lungs.

 _Alicia_. Her name is Alicia. A smile, small and private, spreads across his lips. He sinks deep in his chair and taps his pen quietly against his palm.

Her name is _Alicia_.

Calculus continues around him, not quite a blur. Chris is shocked into reality when Mr. Tylian reminds them of the test tomorrow and collects the homework. The day ends with review on the whiteboard and Chris pledging to bug Julio later to help him study. Despite all the stress and worry he’d being doing later, Chris can’t help a moment of picturing tanned skin and crude roses all in connection with _Alicia_.

 

The new writing comes to on the inside of his wrist only a few minutes after Julio has left. They’d been studying their respective Calc classes in relative silence in the Ortiz kitchen. Now it was well passed eleven at night and Chris was getting ready for bed. He wouldn’t fall asleep until roughly twelve-thirty, but Liza preferred if he was at least settled down for the night.

It’s tilted in familiar blue ink.

 

 

Chris flies up in bed, back rigid. This means his match is one of the five gone from class today. This means they know that they’re giving themselves away. This means—This means it could be _Alicia_.

Or Samantha. Or Darren. Or Jake A. Or Jacob K.

But it could still be _her_. The chances are equally spread between the five of them.

Chris gets out of bed quickly, chest bare and plaid bottoms not tied at the front. He stumbles over to his desk and rifles through a cup for a pen. The ink is a darker blue than the question.

 

 

After a moment’s hesitation, Chris follows that up with _Good luck_ and small smiley face. They send a smile back, this time in a soft pink color. Chris's heart thuds in his chest as he lies back into bed. The pen clicks nervously in his palm. He strangely wants to write _Thank you._

 

 

Chris sleeps like the dead that night. Liza rouses him slowly, in cycles of five minutes, bugging him each time with a new tactic. It all ends with the sheets being ripped off of him. A loud groan of displeasure sounds as Chris smashes his pillow to his face.

“You have ten minutes to get ready, _mijo_ , or I’m leaving without you.”

This prompts a five minutes scrub in cold water – the words on his wrist already partially gone by the time he’s in and rubbing at them with soap. His skin is still damp on his fresh clothes on as he plunders the kitchen for a quick bowl of cereal. He’d brushed his teeth in the shower, so he tugs his shoes on, grabs his backpack from his room, and slams the front door behind him.

 

He spends lunch with Julio doing last minute studying. By now he’s sure that he’s prepared enough to get a solid 90 percent. His mom might even hang that up on the fridge, she’ll be so proud.

Chris is stuffing his notebook into his backpack, shoving his pencil into a front pocket—

“What’s that?” Julio suddenly asks. Chris turns and looks up at him. His friend’s thick brows are drawn in, eyes stricken. His own face forms a look of confusion.

“What’s what?” Settling his backpack onto his shoulder, Chris tucks his lunch chair in.

“On your hand. Looks like writing, but you don’t own a purple pen.”

Chris glances down, knowing there shouldn’t be anything there.

 _Goodluck!_ followed by a series of smiley faces and small stars is settled on the edge of the back of his hand and wrist. Something akin to _right_ lies across his chest before it thuds into his gut. It’s instinct to deny it. _He could too own a purple pen. You judgin’, Julio?_

Before any refusal is said though, Julio is giving him a stern glare. “I would know, Chris. I gave you my spares.”

Chris’s face is hot. He can feel it on the bridge of his cheek bones and over his neck, behind his ears. It’s everywhere, this intense flaring of his skin rolling across him. It’s all he can do to gruffly state, “It’s nothing, Jule, can we just drop it?”

That seems to be answer enough for Julio. “Do you—oh, my god, _Chris_ —are you _matched_?” Voice now a whisper, sharp and pointed. Julio’s stance is defensive and abrasive, chest high and shoulder slightly hunched. Chris recognizes it as betrayed. Julio uses it towards everyone who doubts his loyalty: his father, his teachers, never towards Chris.

He scans the cafeteria quickly before yanking Julio’s arm. They exit the room, swim through a steady stream of students to Julio’s locker. It’s a closer haven and only a few doors down from the Calc room. Chris has five minutes to save face and prove he didn’t mean to keep this secret while knowing _he totally did_.

“You _are_.” Clicking of the lock dial, slamming of textbooks and binders, Chris doesn’t answer. Julio knows him too well. “You don’t know who.”

Chris sags into the metal, letting it cool his hot neck. His backpack is settled onto his feet. The temptation to sink to the floor is unbearable. Something sharp hits his eyes in the corners. He rolls his eyes back and forth to make it go away. It almost works. He should have told Julio from the start. Julio would have told him, had they be reversed.

“Not yet. They’re in my Calculus class.” Before Julio can ask, “We talk about homework sometimes.”

That gets a hesitant but teasing smile from his best friend. “She must be a smart one, then?”

“She?”

“C’mon, man, purple pen. I don’t mean to, like,” he flips his hand in the air for a moment, “stereotype or whatever, but must be a girl, right?” A light goes off in Julio’s brown eyes, “Isn’t that girl in your class? The one you’ve been mooning over since freshman year.”

God, Julio knows him a _little too well_. Chris pointedly doesn’t look at him as he mutters, “Yeah. Alicia.”

 Julio reads the tone, questions softly, “Think it’s her?”

Chris shrugs, tugging his backpack onto his shoulder as the bell rings above them. Students start swarming in specific directions around them. Snippets of conversation filter around them.

When Chris doesn’t say anything, Julio nods. “Fingers crossed, man.”

 

Mr. Tylian wastes no time. Once everyone is seated and has ‘writing utensils and calculators only’ on their desks, exams are handed out in uniform fashion. Chris was a few moments late to class. He avoided eye contact with anyone, carefully keeping his wrist covered, and only says good luck to Robert when he asks about simple derivatives.

The pen he had chosen to write with was a bold, over-confident choice. His name glides with the ballpoint on the top of the paper. He starts with sweaty palms and a plan.  

Midway through the exam, chest pounding, Chris takes his pen and draws a small earth on his wrist near the stars. He moves on to the next question, promising that he’ll only look once he’s completed the problem. It turns out to be a three part question. Chris curses his luck. When he pulls his hand out from under the table, he breaths out a small smile and chuckle.

 

 

A crescent moon has been added, floating in the familiar purple ink. Chris wants to answer right away, but instead swore to answer the last question before replying. It’s a short one, a simple tangent line figuration. Chris finishes it in minutes.

Alicia stands up from her own desk, starting to pack up her things. Chris is writing his own answer. He yanks his hand up from under the table as she’s handing in her exam.

 

 

All the air leaves his lungs in one fell swoop. The classroom seems to go quieter than it already is. Josh stops tapping his pencil, Robert doesn’t shift in his chair, Mandy doesn’t snap her bubblegum.

Chris looks up and into a set of honey brown eyes. She’s looks nervous. Chris must look stunned and ground to a pulp. He feels like he does. There’s just no way. There’d been a 20% chance that it was, but there’s just _no way_.

Mr. Tylian is asking what Alicia is doing. She’s just standing there, shifting her bag from one shoulder to the other, weight from heel to heel, purple pen clicking away in hand. Chris feels like a heel. He can see the spread of pen on her wrist, matching his own.

“No way,” is whispered from somewhere across the room.

Numb fingers pick up his pen, track across his skin and form a question of his own.

 

 

She doesn’t look down to see if it work. Chris’s baffled smile seems to be enough for her, as well as the shrill copy of “ _no way_ ” that sounds again. Instead she drops her grip on her pen, letting her hands sway at her sides.

Her smile is like sunshine. “Found you.”

 


End file.
